The Australian Women's Register

The McLeod Country Golf Club as founded in 1968 with the establishment of the first 9 holes. The 18 hole course was completed by 1972. Located in the western suburbs of Brisbane, Queensland, it is the only golf club in the southern hemisphere managed by female members. The club welcomes both females (Members) and males (Fellows) and has recently commenced a proactive program to encourage juniors.

Glynis Nunn is the only Australian to have won an Olympic multi-discipline athletics event. She won gold in the heptathlon at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

Loris Williams was a passionate advocate for the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to use archives as a means of reconnecting with their family, country and Indigenous identity. She was the first Aboriginal person from Queensland to gain professional archival qualifications and only the second Aboriginal person to do so. She spent the last 11 years of her life helping Indigenous people to reconnect with their Indigenous identity and encouraging her professional colleagues, non-Indigenous as well as Indigenous, to recognize the significance of this work.

Daphne Pirie was a nationally ranked track and field athlete who captained the Queensland women’s athletics and hockey teams and represented Australia in hockey. She is now a world-ranked Master’s Athlete, winning eight gold medals in international competitions. In 1989 she was awarded an MBE for services to hockey.

For an entire decade, Olympic swimmer Susie O’Neill won a medal at every single international swimming competition. She holds a record 35 Australian titles and eight Olympic medals. Dubbed ‘Madame Butterfly’, O’Neill achieved world number one ranking in both the 100m and 200m butterfly events. She was also ranked world number one in the 200m freestyle from 1999-2000.

Libby Lenton’s competitive swimming career was launched in 2003 at the Telstra Australian Championships when she broke the Australian record for the 50m freestyle. She broke her own record later that year, becoming the first Australian woman to swim the distance in less than 25 seconds. She set Commonwealth and Australian records in the 50m and 100m freestyle at the FINA World Cup and was named Australian Swimming Discovery of the Year.

By 2004, Lenton was a dual Olympic medallist, winning gold in the 4x100m freestyle relay with Alice Mills, Petria Thomas and Jodie Henry, and bronze in the 50m freestyle. At the Telstra Trials in Sydney, preceding the Olympics, she broke the 100m freestyle world record with a time of 53.66. In 2006, Libby Lenton won five gold and two silver medals at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. That year she broke the world record for the 100m freestyle at the Telstra Trials (also in Melbourne). She won five gold medals and one silver at the 2006 World Short Course in Shanghai, becoming the World Short Course record holder in the 100m and 200m freestyle and 100m butterfly.

The second youngest of seven children, Mabel Springfield was raised in a sporty family, and began competitive swimming at an early age. At fourteen she was participating in the Queensland Ladies’ Amateur Swimming Association’s first women’s State championship. She won the championship several years in a row. She qualified to compete in the Olympic Games in both 1920 and 1924, but could not afford to join the team until 1928, when she was selected as a chaperon for female competitors at the Games in Amsterdam. It was here that she decided to begin a career in coaching, rather than competing. She coached swimmers at the Booroodabin Baths in Brisbane, taught swimming at local schools, and trained several State representatives as well as Olympian Nancy Lyons.

Springfield died from injuries received in a car accident while returning from a holiday in 1966.

Karla Gilbert’s record speaks for itself. She has won back to back world Ironwoman championships (2000 and 2002), seven consecutive Ironwoman series wins (1996-2002), sixteen Australian championships, seven Queensland titles and numerous other championship events. There is absolutely no doubt of her dominance in the sport throughout the 1990s and early 2000’s. Furthermore, through her involvement at the highest level, Gilbert has helped to raise public awareness of surf lifesaving in the community.

Gilbert entered the sport in 1980, when her parents joined her in the Nippers program at Palm Beach. She won her first attempt at a professional ironwoman event (the first even professional ironwoman race in Australia) ten years later in 1990. She was only fifteen years old.

Vicki Wilson started playing netball in 1972 at the age of seven. By the time she had hung up her skirt in 1999, she was one of Australia’s most decorated and successful players, having earned 104 test caps over the journey, more than any other Australian player. She represented Australia for fifteen years with the last four as captain. She played in four World Championship tournaments (the most of any Australian player), was a member of a victorious team three times (1991, 1995, 1999), and captained the world champion team in her last game in 1999. She was captain of the team that won the first ever gold medal for netball in the Commonwealth Games at Kuala Lumpur in 1998, although she says the most memorable moment of her career was winning the 1991 World Championship in Sydney. Arguably the best goal shooter in the world in the 1990s, when asked by a junior netballer in 1999 why she had such great shooting accuracy, her response was, ‘200 shots a day x 6 days a week, and that’s 200 shots that go in. I have been doing that since I was 20 years old’.

A trained physical education teacher, Wilson continued to teach while playing netball, moving to the position of Schools Sports Promotions Officer with the Department of Education in Queensland in 1992. Since then she has held a number of board member ships and government advisory positions, including membership of the Board of the Queensland Academy of Sport. She continues to coach and mentor talented players and works as a senior project manager with Sport and Recreation Queensland in the Queensland Department of Premier and Cabinet.

Gertrude McLeod was educated at the Brisbane High School for Girls. McLeod was an enthusiastic, but not an outstanding, golf player. According to Margaret Kowald, her handicap never fell below sixteen. Nonetheless, McLeod was elected president of the Queensland Ladies’ Golf Union in 1934. In this capacity she raised money for country championships and took the first Queensland women’s team to Sydney in 1938. Like many women’s organisations, the Q.L.G.U. offered financial support to patriotic bodies during World War II.

From 1949 to 1954, McLeod served as president of the Australian Ladies’ Golf Union, sending a team to the British Ladies’ Open Championship in 1950. During her presidency, the Union discussed the changing social background of women golfers (once the domain of wealthy women) and dress codes for women.

McLeod was an associate-member of the Royal Queensland and Indooroopilly golf clubs, and was awarded honorary life membership of the Q.L.G.U. in 1962. She supported the establishment at Mt Ommaney (Brisbane) of the first golf club in Australia to be administered entirely by women, named the McLeod Country Golf Club in her honour.

Born in 1886 in Marrickville, Sydney, Annette Kellerman was a New South Wales swimming champion who left for England aged 18 to help her cash-strapped family. In Europe, she built a name for herself in long distance swimming and exotic swimming and diving demonstrations. By 1906 she had moved to vaudeville theatre in America as ‘Australia’s Mermaid’ and quickly progressed to the big screen. Kellerman enjoyed tremendous success as a silent movie star in mythological underwater films, including Neptune’s Daughter.

When Adair Ferguson won the single sculls title at the 1985 rowing World Championships in Belgium, she became Australia’s first female world champion rower. Her performance was excellent enough for her to be named the 1985 Australian Athlete of the Year; in achieving the honour she beat fellow nominees Jeff Fenech and Alan Border. Ferguson proved it wasn’t a fluke when she won a gold medal in the same event the following year in Edinburgh at the 1986 Commonwealth Games.

Ferguson represented Australia eight times at various international competitions but never at an Olympic Games. 1988 was considered to be her best chance of winning a medal but that year the Australian selectors decided not to send any female rowing competitors.

As well as representing Australia as a sportswoman, Ferguson tried her hand at politics. She stood as the Australian Democrats candidate in the blue ribbon liberal seat of Ryan in the 1990 federal election.

Margaret Jones was Literary Editor for the Herald and worked as a journalist in the London and New York bureaus of John Fairfax Ltd, before becoming Foreign Editor for the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1970s. She reported from North Korea and North Vietnam, and was staff correspondent in Peking, China. Described as a ‘trailblazer for women journalists’, Jones wrote for the Herald newspaper for a total of thirty-three years.

Francesca Merenda began work with Department of Immigration in 1969 as the first ever Italian speaking welfare worker. She was a member of the group appointed by Malcolm Fraser in 1977, and chaired by Sir Frank Galbally, to review post-arrival migrant programs and services.

Francesca Merenda had a long association with Co.As.It. Italian Association of Assistance, including as a member of the Board of Directors after the Association was incorporated in 1984.

In July 2002, the Australian Workers Heritage Centre celebrated the opening of Stage One of its national $8 million project, Women in Australia’s Working History. The first stage is an exhibition, A Lot On Her Hands, featuring the working experiences of a diverse range of Australian women.